On Wed, 22 Jan 2020 at 15:47, Nicolas Grekas <nicolas.grekas+...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello everyone, > > as announced last week, I'm officially opening a discussion for adding a > "Stringable" interface to PHP 8. > > The RFC and its rationale are presented here as required: > https://wiki.php.net/rfc/stringable > I'm still unconvinced on this one, but I was digging into some of the uses you linked to, to understand why it might be used. The background to the Symfony Validator one makes for some interesting reading: https://github.com/symfony/symfony/pull/31083 and https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3029540 It seems that Symfony always intended this particular parameter to be a string, but couldn't enforce that until PHP 7; Drupal abused it by passing in an object, which happens to be stringable but have special behaviour in the templating layer, leading to a compatibility break between the two projects. In a sense it's just luck that the object in question implements __toString(), rather than being a completely unrelated object, since Drupal relies on it being passed back out unmodified. Nonetheless, it's an interesting use case, and it's interesting to speculate whether it might have been designed how it is anyway without that history. Ultimately, the contract is that (string)$foo->getMessage() won't error, which is ... kind of useful, I guess? Regards, -- Rowan Tommins [IMSoP]
